Roberta DREON

Roberta Dreon is Full Professor of Aesthetics at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca' Foscari University, Venice, where she teaches courses in Aesthetics for the Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, as well as in the Master's degree in Economics and Management of the Arts. Since 2011, she has been a member of the Philosophy and Education Sciences PhD Programme at Ca' Foscari University, and since 2021, she has been a member of the Assembly of the National PhD Programme in Sustainability and Climate Change. Since the autumn of 2020, she has been the Rector’s Delegate for Humanities Research at Ca' Foscari. Since June 2019, she has been co-director of the journal European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, indexed in Scopus. Since 2007, she has been a member of the Italian Society of Aesthetics, where she serves as Delegate for Internationalisation, and since 2008, she has been a member of the Pragma Association. She directs the CLAVeS research center (Cognition, Language, Action, and Sensibility) at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca' Foscari University (http://www.unive.it/claves-eng) and is also the Deputy Director of the inter-university research center PhilHabits (https://philhabits.org/il-centro/).

Her main research areas include pragmatism, aesthetics, philosophy of habits, philosophy of emotions, and the connections between language and experience from an anthropological perspective. She has worked on classical pragmatism, particularly the philosophy of John Dewey – but has also written on James, Mead, and contemporary pragmatism, notably that of Joseph Margolis – and on contemporary aesthetic debates (pragmatist aesthetics, evolutionary aesthetics, environmental aesthetics). She has explored several conceptual categories of classical aesthetics (the notions of autonomy/heteronomy of art, the concepts of genius, aesthetic experience, and aesthetic disinterestedness), and more recently, she has proposed a philosophical anthropology based on pragmatism. On this topic, she published a book, Human Landscapes. Contributions to a Pragmatist Anthropology (SUNY Press 2022), focusing on the themes of sensibility, habits, and the idea of “enlanguaged experience”. She has written articles on sensibility (both perceptual and affective), on the theory of emotions, the theory of habits, and the concept of affective habits, on the intertwining of language and sensibility in the human environment, and on the relationship between experience and cognition, developing pragmatist arguments in dialogue with the recent debates on embodied and enacted theories of the mind. In the past, she has worked on phenomenology and hermeneutics, with a book on the concepts of time and experience in Heidegger’s early philosophy (Franco Angeli 2003). She later worked on the relationships between sensibility and language, concerning Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, and Dewey, publishing a volume by Mimesis in 2007. Subsequently, she published a monograph on Dewey’s aesthetics (Marietti 2012), translated into French by Questions Théoriques in 2017.